non_aligned

I think this is interesting, but perhaps for reasons other than intended. I think it shows the formation of the post-war mythology that Germans used to explain to themselves how their family members or parents were good people, and did not deserve any punishment, despite the involvement in the most genocidal movement in modern history.

When you read these accounts, it always feels like no one had any agency or knowledge what's going on, that Hitler was basically a lone wolf who installed himself in power against the wishes of the nation, that had some outlandish ideas that no good German believed in, and that then he and a small band of his supporters somehow forced everyone to comply.

And to be clear, it was a totalitarian state, but it also wasn't North Korea and no Soviet Union. If nothing else, you could always leave. Many countries wouldn't take fleeing Jews, but as a German, you'd be welcomed with open hands almost everywhere.

So yes, of course there were people who hated the regime, and just decided they didn't want to or couldn't rock the boat. But a significant portion of the population approved of what was happening. Hitler was wildly popular. Millions of people enthusiastically bought into what he was selling. Germany perceived itself as a wounded lion after WWI. They felt they had a rightful claim on their "living space". And antisemitism in Europe needed no marketing. Tellingly, purges of Jews continued even after the war in the Soviet sphere of influence.

My point is, for every person who genuinely had no choice, there were ten who definitely had it, who more or less approved what was happening, and who would have been proud of it had Germany won the war.

> just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and material.

You're right that's a hobby. But the hobby's definition of "proper maintenance" and what it "requires" is basically just people nerding out about things that don't matter the slightest in the real world.

To maintain a kitchen knife so that it cuts a tomato without squishing it, you don't need a book on knife science. Further, that nerdery is probably actively harmful, because instead of simple solutions, people are told they need an inspection microscope and a variety of jigs and other implements. So they buy an objectively bad electric sharpener and move on.

Ultrasonic knives have been available for non-food uses for a long time. They are useful in certain narrow applications, such as cutting leather or some plastics.

That said, they come with two big caveats. First, if you push them into any harder material, the edge is destroyed almost immediately because of the micro-scale "jackhammer" action. So, hit that avocado pit and the knife is probably cooked.

Second, the constant motion heats up the blade, to the point of melting thermoplastics or causing the edge to lose temper if you're pushing a bit too hard, cutting the wrong material, etc.

It's your money, but I suspect this knife is more of a hassle, and requires more care, than a regular kitchen knife. And let's face it, the coolness factor aside, how often do you struggle to cut chicken, tomatoes, or bread? If you do, it's probably because your knife is dull, and this knife will get dull too.

I would be surprised if that's the case. For commonly-used functions, you quickly learn knob shapes and their general locations. I'm sure you can adjust volume without looking in both cars.

With touchscreens, it's not just that you lose the tactile component, but all these interfaces are modal, with buttons that disappear or move around depending on the screen you're on.

Oh, you're on the radio screen? There's no way to adjust seat heating from here... or if there is one, it's in a different place than on the AC screen.

Well, if you define leaders as people who do the things outlined in the article, then sure, it tautologically describes the traits of leaders. But then, it means that Steve Jobs wasn't a leader, Bill Gates wasn't a leader, Jeff Bezos isn't a leader - basically, none of the most successful business-builders qualify. Apparently, they were all just managers.

So then, who is the article about? And more to the point, if it's not a recipe for success, why should I follow its advice?

No, but these are slogans that seldom survive contact with reality.

"Managers Hoard Information. Leaders Overshare." - sure, until they don't. Because as companies grow, the probability that there is a hostile or careless employee in the audience approaches 1. That employee may tell a friend working at a competitor, may talk to a journalist, and so on. Most tech companies are funded on the principle of radical transparency, but then start compartmentalizing information because oversharing doesn't scale.

"Managers Weaponize Policy. Leaders Bend Rules for People." - likewise, this works up to a point. Past that point, if every "leader" within the company is bending the rules, you end up in an unmanageable mess, and outcomes that are unfair and legally perilous ("how come the company made an exception for Jill but not Joe?").

"Managers Fire Fast. Leaders Coach, Then Help People Land Softly." / "Managers Avoid Hard Conversations. Leaders Run Toward Them." - wait, so which one is it? Firing someone is a hard conversation, and in my experience, line managers often avoid it, letting performance problems fester for too long. Then, it's the "leaders" (the top brass - founders, etc) who decide that things have gone too far and we need to make brutal 10% cuts across the board.

"Managers Reward Compliance. Leaders Reward Dissent." - this varies, but the tolerance for dissent is usually higher among line managers than top leadership, simply because dissent is guaranteed once you hit a certain scale and your company can't be run as a perpetual discussion club. At some point, you need to get behind the plan or look for another job. I'd wager that Steve Jobs wasn't all that keen on dissent from random employees. Similarly, if you work at Palantir and tell them that they should sever ties with the Dept Homeland Security, I'm sure they will be happy to show you the door.

Sure, but if I said that, I'd have a response saying that actually, it's not true. So let's start with a conservative number. It still doesn't add up.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Yes, if you're truly exceptional, you can get in the US. You can also get into any other country in the world. And the Trump administration doesn't seem to be interested in changing that.

But only a tiny sliver of what you would consider successful, skilled people can qualify for O-1. To my original point: if you're "merely" hard-working and good at something, you - as a general rule - have no lawful pathway to immigrate to the US.

Here's another way to look at it: let's say that in any country, roughly 10% of people fall into the category of "talented and hard-working" - not superstars, but the kind of people who would conceptually enrich the economy. Worldwide, that's probably what, 400 million adults? Further, let's say that about 10% would be interested in living in the US. And before all the EU folks sneer at that: that's probably a big underestimate, because a good chunk of the world is living in places with a much lower standard of living. So that's 40 million who probably want to come. And the total number of employment visas is ~100k/year. We aim for the global top <0.1%.

> A core strategic strength of the US over the last century has been that everyone with any talent wants to come here to work, and by and large we’ve let them do so.

That's largely a myth, though. The vast majority of smart, driven people have no path to lawfully immigrate to the US.

By a wide margin, the main immigration pathway are family visas (i.e., marriages and citizens bringing in relatives). H-1B visas are a comparatively small slice that's available via a lottery only to some professions and some backgrounds - and the process is basically gamed by low-wage consultancies, with a large proportion of the rest gobbled up by a handful of Big Tech employers. And that's before we even get to the fact that H-1B doesn't necessarily give you a path to permanent residency, depending on where you're from.

For most people who aren't techies, the options are really very limited, basically "be exceptionally wealthy", "be a celebrity", or "be one of the world's foremost experts on X".

I think you're addressing the wrong part of the argument. Of course there are loose associations between concepts that manifest on abstract word-association tasks.

It is a considerably stronger yet less-supported statement that these biases fundamentally corrupt your thinking: that you look at Australia and can't help yourself but think it's 10% worse than Greenland.

It is an even stronger and even less-supported statement the world is going to be better off if we stop using certain tainted words or drawing maps in a certain way - i.e., that these biases hurt people and can be excised with one simple linguistic or cartographic trick.

It's a lot easier to interpret these debates as the manifestation of a bad personality trait: the desire to get sanctimonious about how other people are living their lives.

I know it's a joke and I had a sensible chuckle, but if you want to routinely use it at work, just keep in mind that it's probably gonna make things worse.

Since you can't exhaustively enumerate every good thing or every bad thing on the internet, a lot of security detection mechanisms are based on heuristics. These heuristics produce a fair number of false positives as it is. If you bring the rate up, it just increases the likelihood that your security folks will miss bad things down the line.

I think it's just clunky, like "a pencil can be used for a recipe". My first take is "wait, are we cooking a pencil? or stirring with it?"

The first meaning of "use for a recipe" is "use as an ingredient."

But then, it's a pretty weird thing to explain to begin with, approximately every human on the planet knows what the word "list" means. So what does this pseudo-definition add?

> It's a cute "how do I reach these kids?" idea

But... which kids? Do we have a fundamental problem reaching kids who are interested in basketball? My kid had a period of being interested in dinosaurs, but I never felt the need to reframe everything in dinosaur-terms because of that. In fact, you kinda want them to broaden their horizons beyond dinosaurs?

The real challenges in education are elsewhere, and a lot of it has to do with socioeconomic status and bad influences early in life.

"Having" and "willing to use" are two things, right?

The problem is that the US, for the most part, no longer has any appetite for projects that leave the landscape scarred and the waters polluted.

In California, we prefer to go through annual cycles of water rationing rather than build new dams. I'm sure the mindset would change if things get sufficiently dire, but that threshold might be farther than we assume.

I really don't think that's a good example. That's someone who designers hold in high esteem. Most people today would not buy products with these aesthetics.

Granted, I does hold up better than most, but I don't think it's an example of some immutable, objective principles of fashion.

> I think using GenAI for learning is cool and exciting (especially for autodidacts)

I don't know. I've been trying, but I think there are two fundamental issues. First, I don't think it's all that useful for "out-of-order" learning and for explaining concepts in non-conventional ways.

To give you a practical example, there's a certain order in which we teach math, and every subsequent step builds on the previous one. But quite often, this order is just a matter of convention, not necessity. You can explain a ton of higher-math concepts in terms of high-school algebra and geometry, it's just not something we do because we don't intend to teach high-schoolers any of that, and for undergrads, it's more expedient to lean on their knowledge of calculus / mathematical analysis than to start by drawing triangles.

And not once have I succeeded in convincing an LLM to circumvent that. If a topic is explained using mathematical analysis in college textbooks, this is how it will always answer. Which actually sucks for that curious high-schooler.

But second, LLMs just aren't nearly as dependable as textbooks. It's not even the base error rate - I think they're 90%+ accurate on most run-of-the-mill scientific questions - but that once they make a confidently-sounding mistake and you try to drill down, they keep digging that hole and sending you more and more off track. It's amusing if you know the domain and can spot mistakes. It's a huge waste of time when trying to learn a new field.

It's precisely why vibe-coding is more useful to experienced developers who can immediately reject bad results.

Isn't that just a lot of words to say "my taste is objective / rooted in reason, other people's tastes are a crapshoot"?

Can you prescribe some specific test to tell objective design aesthetics from the "groupthink" ones? If not, then what are you saying, other than "I know when I see it, but not everyone does"?

Sure, there are things we do in a particular way because of manufacturability or utility considerations, and that stays pretty stable in the long haul. We put windows in homes in specific places and make them rectangular. But that's not taste, that's practicality. Everything else changes dramatically from one decade to another.

I mean, yes? You're not violating the 4th. We have plenty of other laws, including laws against trespassing, that might apply here.

Ah yeah, I stand corrected. I didn't realize this is a paper by the original team that found the number a while back, I thought it's an independent formalization in 2025.

The research into BB numbers is purely academic and unlikely to be more than that, unless some other part of mathematics turns out to be wrong. Our current understanding is that the numbers are essentially guaranteed to be useless.

This particular proof is doubly-academic in the sense that the value was already known, this is just a way to make it easier to independently verify the result.

It's a part of a broader movement to provide machine proofs for other stuff (e.g., Fermat's last theorem), which may be beneficial in some ways (e.g., identifying issues, making parts of proofs more "reusable").

You're literally arguing that a government intelligence agency couldn't find a couple of experienced people, provide them with commercially-available equipment, and get them to coordinate a medium-complexity task.

Yes, it's an operation that requires coordination and planning, which is why it's reasonable to assume it was carried out by an intelligence agency and not a lone fisherman with a grudge. But once you're in the realm of intelligence activities, this isn't exactly the "let's blow up their pagers" level of complexity.

What's the part that's hard to imagine? It's literally just a boat ride to a publicly-known location that isn't monitored in any way, diving to a depth humans can dive to, placing some standard military / commercial explosives, and getting out.

There were several countries arguably interested in getting rid of that pipeline (Ukraine, Poland, the US), but Ukraine wanted it the most, had easy access, and there's no need to overcomplicate internet theories.

> The appropriate place to find out what is and isn't true is research. Do research, write papers, discuss results, resolve contradictions in findings, reach consensus.

Few hot-button social issues are resolved via research, and I'm not sure they should be. On many divisive issues in social sciences, having a PhD doesn't shield you from working back from what you think the outcome ought to be, so political preferences become a pretty reliable predictor of published results. The consensus you get that way can be pretty shoddy too.

More importantly, a lot of it involves complex moral judgments that can't really be reduced to formulas. For example, let's say that on average, social media doesn't make teen suicides significantly more frequent. But are OK with any number of teens killing themselves because of Instagram? Many people might categorically reject this for reasons that can't be dissected in utilitarian terms. That's just humanity.

"Metacybernetics" is a concept with a small handful of Google hits, some of which appear to be obscure research papers and some appear to be metaphysical crackpottery on blogs.

I think it's worth considering that the theories you're familiar with are incredibly niche, have never gained any foothold in mainstream discussions of system dynamics, and it's not wrong for people not to be aware of them (or to choose not to mention them) in a post addressed at general audiences.

Further, you just missed the opportunity to explain these concepts to a broader HN audience and maybe make sure that the next time someone writes about it, they are aware of this work.

I have no regrets. My point is that it's easy to have regrets if you build your self-worth around the company and your impact there. That's the part that's almost always too ephemeral to matter.

The secret is that the "crazy hours" tricks works best in a normal company, because your contributions stand out. If you're in a place where everyone is expected to work 9-9-6, you're not getting ahead, you're just keeping up until you burn out.

I think LeetCode tests two things. First, your willingness to grind to pass an exam, which is actually a good proxy for some qualities you need to thrive in a corporate environment: work is often grungy and you need to push through without getting distracted or discouraged.

Second, it's a covert test for culture fit. Are you young (and thus still OK with grinding for tests)? Are you following industry trends? Are you in tune with the Silicon Valley culture? For the most part, a terrible thing to test, but also something that a lot of "young and dynamic" companies want to select for without saying so publicly. An AI startup doesn't want people who have family life and want to take 6 weeks off in the summer. You can't put that in a job req, but you can come up with a test regime that drives such people away.

It has very little to do with testing the skills you need for the job, because quite frankly, probably fewer than 1% of the SWE workforce is solving theoretical CS problems for a living. Even if that's you, that task is more about knowing where to look for answers or what experiments to try, rather than being able to rattle off some obscure algorithm.

I worked crazy hours in my early 20s because I liked it. I liked computers, I liked my team, and to be frank, I had not much else to do. If I went home early, I would be spending time on the internet anyway.

But the thing is, unless you're building your own business, it just doesn't matter. No one will remember this in five years. In a corporate environment, every doc, every line of code you wrote will be replaced or forgotten far sooner than you suspect. Two or three reorgs later, your team might not even exist as a distinct entity. There will be no statue of you in the hallway after you're gone.

It's also not your family. If you become any sort of a liability, if you make an off-color joke, if the revenue metrics are off by 5% - thanks kid, here's the door. The first layoffs you go through will be devastating precisely because they crush that illusion. Yeah, your manager might be a genuinely nice and caring person, but by the end of the day, if they're asked to sort a spreadsheet with your name in it and then draw a line somewhere, they will, and there will be "nothing they could do".

The only lasting thing you're getting out of the heroics is the money you save, the skills you learn on the job, and for a short while, the reference you get from your old boss when you apply for the next job. If you optimize for that, you'll probably have a satisfying career. If you don't, you wake up one day realizing that you've given up a good chunk of your life to make Sam Altman 0.01% richer, and that's that.

If a company is demanding that you sacrifice social life and well-being, ask yourself what's it worth to you. Are they paying more than anyone else? Or do they just want to get more kLOC out of you for free?

A lot of technological progress is about moving in the other direction: taking things you can do yourself and having others do it instead.

You can paint your own walls or fix your own plumbing, but people pay others instead. You can cook your food, but you order take-out. It's not hard to sew your own clothes, but...

So no, I don't think it's as simple as that. A lot of people will not want the mental burden of learning a new tool and will have no problem paying someone else to do it. The main thing is that the price structure will change. You won't be able to charge $1,000 for a project that takes you a couple of days. Instead, you will need to charge $20 for stuff you can crank out in 20 minutes with gen AI.

Isn't that just a comforting fantasy, though? Germans also embraced the myth of Hitler as a guy who just somehow hoodwinked everyone and made good people do terrible things.

There was a prominent component of political scheming to his rise to power, and it was a totalitarian state that murdered political opponents even before it got to genocide, but he was enthusiastically supported by a large portion of the German society.

I've seen similar stuff in a couple of other places, including IT back in the 1990s (back when it wasn't nearly as glamorous as it is today).

I think some of this has to do with... resentment? You're this incredibly smart person, you worked really hard, and no one values you. No one wants to pay you big bucks, no one outside a tiny group knows your name even if you make important contributions to the field. Meanwhile, all the dumb people are getting ahead. It's easy to get depressed, and equally easy to decide that if life is unfair, it's OK to cheat to win.

Add to this the academic culture where, frankly, there are fewer incentives to address misbehavior and where many jobs are for life... and you have an explosive mix.